What’s new on Drupal.org? – January 2016

Look at our Roadmap highlighting how this work falls into our priorities set by the Drupal Association staff with the direction from the Board and collaboration with the community.

Drupal.org Updates

Following the Conversation

One of the most requested features from a wide swath of the community has been a better way to follow content on Drupal.org and receive email notifications. The issue queues have had this follow functionality for some time, but the implementation was quite specific to issues, and not easily extensible to the rest of the site.

Because of the volume of content on Drupal.org we have to be careful that our implementation will scale well. We now use a notification system based on the Message stack which functions much more generically and therefore can be applied to many content types on Drupal.org.

Follow functionality is now available for comments on Forum topics, Posts (like this one), Case Studies, and documentation Book Pages.

In the future we intend to extend this follow functionality to include notification of new revisions (for relevant content types, particularly documentation).

Community Elections for the Board

Nominations for the position of At-Large Director from the community are now open. There are two of these positions on the board, each elected on alternating years. For this year’s elections process we’ve made several small refinements:

Candidates are now no longer required to display their real names on their candidate profile. We will now default to the Drupal.org username.

Candidates do not have to provide a photo, we will default to a generic avatar.

Drupal.org Enhancements

A number of smaller enhancements made it into the January sprints as well. One of the key ones was the ability to configure an arbitrary one-off test in the issue queues against a custom branch. This is a small step towards ensuring that the DrupalCI testing framework will support the wider testing matrix required for feature branching, so that Drupal can always be shippable.

We also spent some time in January reviewing the results of the documentation survey that was placed on all existing documentation pages on the site. This information is helping to inform the next big item on the roadmap – improved Documentation section on Drupal.org.

Finally, we’ve continued our battle against spam with the help of Technology Supporter, Distil Networks. We’ve seen some very promising results in initial trials to prevent spam account registrations from happening in the first place, and will continue to work on refining our integration.

Sustaining support and maintenance

DrupalCon New Orleans Full -Site Launched!

In January we also launched the full -site for DrupalCon New Orleans with registration and the call for papers. As part of this launch, Events.drupal.org now supports multiple, simultaneous event registrations with multiple currencies, payment processors, and invoice formats. This was a significant engineering lift, but has made Events.drupal.org even more robust.

DrupalCon New Orleans is happening from May 9-13th, and will be the first North American DrupalCon after the release of Drupal 8!

DrupalCon Dublin

The next European DrupalCon will also be here before you know it, and we’ve been working with the local community and our designer to update the DrupalCon Dublin splash page with a new logo that we will carry through into the design for the full-site once that is ready to launch.

Permissions for Elevated Users

In January we also focused on auditing the users with elevated privileges on Drupal.org, both to ensure that they had the permissions they needed, and to enforce our principle of least-access. Users at various levels of elevated privileges were contacted to see if they were still needed, and if not those privileged roles were removed.

The following privileges were also fixed or updated: webmasters can now view a user’s’ public ssh keys; content moderators can administer comments and block spam users without user profile editing privileges. We also fixed taxonomy vocabulary access and now both content moderators and webmasters have access to edit tags in various vocabularies such as Issue tags, giving more community members access to clean those up and fight duplicates or unused tags.

Updates traffic now redirects to HTTPS

SSL is now the default for FTP traffic from Drupal.org and for Updates.drupal.org itself. This helps to enforce a best practice of using SSL wherever possible, and helps to address an oblique attack surface where a man-in-the-middle could potentially hijack an update for someone running their Drupal installation on an unprotected network (i.e. development environments on a personal laptop in a coffee shop).

Devwww2 Recovery

Drupal.org pre-production environments were affected by some instability in January, particulary the devwww2 server. A combination of a hard restart due to losing a NIC on the machine and some file-system level optimizations in the database containers lead to corruption on the dev site databases. Drupal.org infrastructure engineers restored the system and recovered the critical dev sites, and while some instability continues the system has been recovering more cleanly as they work to resolve the issue permanently.

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As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who made it possible for us to work on these projects.